GRANSHAN Competition

A native of Cairo, Kamal’s early education served to stimulate his interest in languages and alphabets, and later on, calligraphy and typography. His higher studies have included Computer Science, Linguistics, and Product Design.

In his 20 years at Monotype, Kamal has been involved in the many challenges of typography and font development for many languages. During that time, he has also participated actively in various activities related to the Unicode Standard. His work has included OpenType implementations for Arabic, Latin, Thai, Khmer, Mongolian, Myanmar, Japanese, as well various Indian minority scripts. Recently, Kamal has contributed to the discussion of future changes for the OpenType Standard. Since 2006, he has served on the Board of Advisers of the Script Encoding Initiative of UC Berkeley. He has twice taught a linguistics course at Stanford University entitled “Writing Systems in the Digital Age”.

Since 2012, he has been a prime contributor to Google’s Noto Font project which produces fonts for the many scripts of the world. Earlier this year, Kamal spoke on Arabic Typography at the Unicode Tutorial Workshop in Oman.